The old HP laptop has, I believe, finally given up the ghost. I spent a good many hours searching for solutions but from what I've been able to find, the problem stems from the fact that the old machine is an hp Compaq Presario F579WM.

Seems that there's even an HP page that talks about how this whole line of machines has had problems with the Bios, CPU and Motherboard. I've found lots of stories about people that have had to have one or even all three items replaced.

Even this would be find if the thing were still under warranty but it's too old for that and I'm not about to fork over cash to have HP do the work. Instead, I figure that if I'm going to have to spend any money on a laptop, I'd be better off thinking "new machine" than pouring good money after bad.

With that thought in mind, I headed off to Buy.com's weekly sale page, figuring that's a good place to start my search. Hey, I might as well save some money if I can right?

I've spent a good deal of time in this search and I'll probably spend a good deal more time on it. Buying a new computer is a big deal in my opinion because whichever machine I end up with is going to have to last, even with sale prices, the budget just isn't going to be there to do it again for a LONG time. It's got to be something with a good track record and availability for parts & hardware upgrades.

The machine I'm looking over today might just be the ticket. It's a Toshiba Satellite Pro U400-S1001V Notebook. My sister-in-law has had an older Toshiba laptop that she's been using for a year or three now with actually very little in the way of problems. In her words "the only thing wrong with it is the operator". Even so, it's still working in spite of an accidental coffee spill, some of which went inside via the keyboard, all the way to the motherboard. That says a lot about the resiliency of the Toshiba.

The screen on the new Toshiba Satellite Pro is a tad small at 13.3" but the Centrino Duo Core 2 Duo processor means it makes up for that with additional processing power.

Running at 2.1Ghz means it'd be the fastest computer I've ever had, 160GB hard drive, DVD-RWrite, Fast Ethernet, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth all add up to making it easily up to any task I'm liable to ask of it in the foreseeable future.

Those are all a great bunch of reasons to consider this machine but there is still one really big reason that I'm wanting this one. You see, it comes with Windows Vista Business as it's operating system. NO, I do not want to use any flavor of Vista thank you very much. I've had just enough experience with Vista to NEVER want to mess with it again.

So why do I want a machine that comes with Windows Vista Business?? Because it also comes with "Windows XP Professional Downgradable Media" (though I consider XP to be an UPgrade from any flavor of Vista!). That way as soon as I get it, I boot Vista long enough to make up a full set of backup / recovery disks just in case, then I spend some time turning it into a really fast XP Pro machine. For that matter, it'd be a great time to put together an XP Pro / Linux dual boot.

I figure that this combination of hardware and software will give me the best of both worlds. A modern, fast machine and a choice of operating systems that I actually prefer to use instead of being stuck with Vista. (and don't even get me started on the latest "seven" nightmare-in-the-making! Microsoft is off it's corporate rocker.)